The Venerable Nicholas Owen, lay brother of the Society of Jesus, was a man of singular innocence of life and remarkable piety, and was well known to the Catholics of England for the services he rendered to religion, by his skill in contriving hiding-places in the houses of the nobility and gentry, in which priests as well as the furniture of the altar might be concealed, on occasion of the sudden visits and minute searches of the pursuivants. In the year 1606 he was in attendance upon F. Henry Garnet, the Provincial, and when he was arrested on the charge of complicity in the gunpowder plot, Owen also was seized and put to the torture, in hopes of eliciting some evidence, against F. Garnet or others. The constancy of the holy man was unshaken by the trial; but so fearful were the pains inflicted on him, that he died almost immediately on being taken off the rack, deserving to be called a true martyr in the cause of our holy religion. The precise day of his death is not known, but it was near the day of the cruel execution of F. Garnet, which took place on the 3rd of May.